Foreign Affairs (16 page)

But when he turns around with a load over his arm Nico is still standing in the middle of the Turkey carpet. In his open-necked white shirt and black rubber boots, with Posy’s red fringed scarf knotted around his waist, he looks as if he were playing pirates; his expression is theatrically stormy.

“Hey, let’s go,” Fred says.

“No,” Nico hisses through his teeth, in character.

“No?”

“I am not a servant.” Nico’s voice is barely under control. “I don’t pack the dirty clothes of people.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Fred rolls up some suprisingly elegant maroon silk pajamas and stuffs them into the bag. “Don’t be a wimp.”

Nico does not move. He looks insulted; probably he has never heard of a wimp and thinks it is something unspeakable. “Sorry,” Fred says. “Look, maybe you could just pile up those books and papers, all right?”

“All right,” Nico says sullenly.

“What I don’t understand,” Fred goes on, trying to ease the atmosphere in the room, “is why William has to get out of the way so fast. I can understand that maybe Sir James Billings wouldn’t want to meet a lot of strangers when he’s just got back from Turkey late at night. But he must be used to William; after all he’s Posy’s cousin.”

Nico snorts. “You are wrong, and also stupid,” he says, slinging
Royal Charles
and
Betrayal
onto the bed.

Fred decides not to notice the word
stupid
, which Nico has no doubt used as a riposte for
wimp.
“But he
is
her cousin; Posy said so when she introduced us before lunch,” he says, starting to pack up William’s leather toilet kit.

“Yes, her cousin, I suppose.” Nico’s tone is scornful. “They are all cousins here. And also her lover.”

“Aw, come on.” Fred thinks of Posy, so blond and queenly and tall, in her way as much the real thing as Rosemary. “I can’t believe that.” He imagines Posy naked, a luscious full-bodied late-Victorian nude, in sexual juxtaposition with the lanky, dim, fiftyish William, the relevant part of whom is somehow represented in his mind by the worn beaver shaving brush with dried white soap on it that he has just stowed away.

“No? Why not?”

“Well, I mean, he’s too old. And he’s not all that attractive either. I mean, hell, Posy’s a beautiful woman.”

“Who can calculate these things?” Nico tosses the
Times
untidily beside the books. “It’s a matter of opinions. Myself, I would not want to fuck with Lady Posy; you would not want to fuck with Cousin William.”

“No,” Fred agrees vehemently, reminded that Nico, in spite (or perhaps because) of his macho appearance, presumably fucks regularly with Edwin Francis.

“Also, sex, it is not always a matter of only desire, as you must know.” Nico allows a slight unpleasant pause. “Cousin William is not wealthy or famous, but he has many connections. With his help Posy is a feature in the magazines, on the television. Soon she introduces for him six programs about English gardens, for a nice payment. He does much for her.”

And if Cousin William would do as much for me, Nico seems to be saying, I might fuck with him. Or even worse: Rosemary is rich and famous, she does much for you. The conviction that Nico is a sly, second-rate, opportunistic person, a blot on the country-house scene, comes over Fred. “Maybe, but that doesn’t prove—”

“Also you see he stays in the room next to Lady Posy’s, the customary room of the husband.” With a mocking flourish Nico pulls open a paneled oak door, exposing a vertical slice of Posy’s blue-and-white sprigged and ruffled Laura Ashley bedroom.

“So?” Fred says, concealing his fear that Nico is right, but not his dislike.

“So convenient.” Nico smiles.

Fred does not smile. He goes on packing William’s clothes, faster than before. Though most of them are clean, they now feel disagreeable: the tightly rolled thin dark lisle socks, the slippery starched shirts with the name of a Belgravia laundry on the paper band. He does not like them; he does not like the paneled room with its deep tapestry-cushioned chairs and window seat, its distorting mullioned panes, its connecting door. An impulse to walk away comes to him, but his training in manners is strong, and he presses on.

“You’re saying that William had to get out of the house fast because if Posy’s husband saw him here, he’d think they were having an affair,” he says, trying to clarify it in his mind.

“Not think.” Nico’s expression is condescending. “He knows already that they fuck, since a long time.”

“Says who?”

“Edwin says it to me. They have an arrangement, he says.”

“You mean like an open marriage.” Fred begins to pull out the drawers below the wardrobe. They are empty and lined with glazed paper in an overcomplicated and disagreeable red paisley design.

“I don’t know what you call it,” says Nico. He has given up all pretense of helping and is lounging on the window seat. “Edwin says they well understand each other, and if Billings does not have to meet Cousin William he is content, why not? He has still the beautiful aristocratic wife, the pretty children, the rich country house—”

“Yeh, but—”

“He also has his freedom, naturally. His own amusements.”

“Oh, yeh? What amusements?”

“I don’t know.” Nico shrugs. “But Edwin says they are expensive ones, and not very nice.”

Without wanting to, Fred starts trying to imagine the sort of amusements that might be considered not very nice by Edwin Francis, a homosexual who likes to dress up in his hostess’s clothes; but he is interrupted.

“Well, how are you getting on?” Posy pauses in the doorway with an armful of scalloped yellow sheets. She is as beautiful and gracious as ever; but she looks different to Fred, somehow fleshy and loose.

“Almost done.” He bundles the
Times
into William’s bag and pulls the sides together.

Posy surveys the room, taking in Nico lazily prone on the window seat. “Very good,” she says to Fred. “Now, could you be a real sport, and take the bag down to the boathouse?”

“Yeh, sure.”

“I’ll show you the way; and then you can come back and have a drink and meet Jimbo. But you musn’t keep him up late, please, he’s had such a long trip. I know what; you might say you have to turn in early so you can get up and jog before breakfast. Jimbo will like that, he often runs himself; and it might not be a bad idea if you were to arrange to meet him tomorrow and go jogging together. Then we can make sure he doesn’t run in the wrong direction.” Posy smiles at him again, then clicks it off. “And you. Nico.” She gives him a chilly look. “I want you to go straight to bed. Don’t even think of having a shower tonight, or there won’t be enough hot water for Jimbo. You were in there for an hour this afternoon as it is. And please don’t come down for breakfast; Jimbo’s very grumpy at breakfast. I’ll send you up a tray.”

For a long moment Nico does not move. His handsome features have darkened and distorted as Posy spoke and are now set in an angry flush. But her aristocratic stare is too much for him; he rises slowly and moves toward the door.

“Thank you,” she says, gracious again. “All right now, Freddy darling, it’s this way.”

Posy leads him along the hall between two rows of ancestors: plump-jawed self-satisfied countenances in heavy curled wigs. The portraits are hung from near the ceiling in such a way that they tilt outward from the top, creating an oppressive effect.

“He’s such a nuisance sometimes, Nico,” she says. “He’s got all sorts of silly ideas about politics, and I’m simply not going to have him bothering poor Jimbo with them, especially not at breakfast. You know how excitable these Mediterranean types can be.” She opens the door to some back stairs, smiling at Fred, inviting him into the company of non-Mediterranean types who are not excitable and have no silly ideas. “So if you should see him trying to sneak downstairs tomorrow morning, I hope you’ll be a dear and head him off.”

“Well. I’ll try,” says Fred reluctantly.

“I knew I could count on you.” She stops at the bottom of the stairs and smiles up from under her golden mane, which from this angle looks almost too thick, too perfectly curled—almost like a wig. Maybe it is a wig; maybe underneath all that hair Posy Billings is bald or stubble-headed, as her eighteenth-century ancestors along the corridor probably were under their powdered headpieces.

“Here you are.” She swings open a door, admitting a gust of cold, dark air. “Now there’s the way down to the lake, where we were this afternoon, you remember?”

“I think so.”

“Very good.” As Edwin has remarked, there is an authoritarian, even a military tone to Posy’s manner. “Here’s a torch, but I don’t expect you’ll need it, it’s quite light out. You can almost see the boathouse from here, just past those big pines. And the rain’s cleared off nicely. A lovely night, really. Off you go, now.”

Fred starts down the path. It doesn’t seem like a lovely night to him. In the circle of light at his feet the gravel is loose and wet; when he points the torch upward he can see the two-hundred-year-old topiary hedges, dark and dripping, on either side. The fanciful shapes of pigeons, peacocks, owls, and urns seem distorted, almost sinister. In the sky above is a lopsided yellowish moon with a pale greasy ring around it, like a badly fried egg It is bright enough, however, for Fred to circumnavigate the pines and make out the boathouse, a crouching structure of pebblestone with a deep overhanging roof and its feet in inky water.

“Yes?” William opens the door a cautious crack. He is still wearing the baggy knickers and plaid kneesocks in which he portrayed an uncultured schoolboy, and has a rough hairy brown blanket, perhaps the one which earlier was part of the cow, round his shoulders. He looks guilty and disreputable, like some old crazed tramp caught hiding in the outbuildings of an estate. “What did you want?”

“I brought your things.” Fred decides that if he ever, God forbid, has an affair with a married woman, he won’t set foot in her house, not so much on pragmatic or moral grounds as on aesthetic ones.

“Oh, thank you very much.” William opens the door just enough to admit his bag. He doesn’t invite Fred to come in, and Fred doesn’t want to come in.

“Well, see you,” he says, turning away.

From the lake Posy’s house looks unnaturally tall and somehow misshapen; an effect perhaps of its elevation, the shadows and shrubberies that surround it, and the fried-egg moonlight. As Fred walks slowly back up the path past the giant dark vegetable birds and urns, he becomes conscious of a strong impulse not to reenter this house; to hike instead into the nearest village and find a bed for the night somewhere (at the pub, maybe?) and take an early train or bus into London in the morning.

But of course he can’t do that, it would be rude and crazy; and besides there’s Rosemary. He can’t leave her alone with two posturing queers and a bossy adulteress whose hair looks like a wig—though only an hour ago he thought it was all beautiful, the real thing.

James again, Fred thinks: a Jamesian phrase, a Jamesian situation. But in the novels the scandals and secrets of high life are portrayed as more elegant; the people are better mannered. Maybe because it was a century earlier; or maybe only because the mannered elegance of James’ prose obfuscates the crude subtext. Maybe, in fact, it was just like now . . .

Because, after all, isn’t Rosemary the classic James heroine: beautiful, fine, delicate, fatally impulsive? She thinks of Posy and Edwin as her best friends; she is too generous to see them as they are, too lighthearted and trusting. She needs other, better friends—better in both senses—friends who will shield her from scenes like tonight’s—

Well, isn’t that what he’s here for, the sterling young American champion James himself might have provided? For the second time that day Fred has the giddy sense of having got into a novel, and again it is dizzying, exhilarating. He laughs out loud and plunges into the blackened shrubberies, toward the house.

5

V
INNIE
M
INER
is sitting on a bench in a primary school playground in Camden Town, watching a group of little girls skipping rope. It is a windy April afternoon; gray and white clouds like jumbled soapy washing slosh across the sky, sending alternate brightness and shadow over her notebook. She already has a thick folder of rhymes recorded in this school and several others; but as a contemporary folklorist she is interested not only in texts but in the cultural settings in which they occur, how they are passed on and by whom, the manner of their delivery, and their social function. So far today she has seen and heard nothing strikingly new, but she isn’t disappointed. She has spoken to one class and collected material from this and from two others, concentrating her efforts on the ten- and eleven-year-olds who are usually her best informants: younger children know fewer rhymes, and older ones are beginning to forget them under the pernicious influence of mass culture and of puberty.

Overall, Vinnie’s working hypothesis about the differences between British and American game rhymes has been supported. The British texts do tend to be older, in some cases suggesting a medieval or even an Anglo-Saxon origin; they are also more literary. The American rhymes are newer, cruder, less lyrical and poetic.

More complex analysis will come later; she can see already, however, that violence is common in the verses of both countries, something that wouldn’t surprise any trained observer and doesn’t surprise Vinnie, who has never thought of children as particularly sweet or gentle.